Media take Gloucester by storm

Almost immediately following a published report that Gloucester High School students made a pact to become pregnant, the national media swarmed the Massachusetts city and its residents.

Stephanie Silverstein

Almost immediately following a published report that Gloucester High School students made a pact to become pregnant, the national media swarmed the Massachusetts city and its residents.

The news spread internationally, and many residents are not enjoying the negative attention their beloved city is receiving.

Loretta Peres, a resident of the Riverdale Park neighborhood, has received phone calls at her home and knocks on her door from reporters looking for the pregnant students. She saw reporters going door-to-door in the subsidized housing neighborhood.

“This is my guess, is they are figuring that the youth that are going to have babies are going to be the youth that have subsidized housing,” Peres said. “They targeted a population that they figured they would find the youth, which they did.”

On Maplewood Avenue, Peres watched in awe as one reporter spotted two young girls with baby carriages and ran after them.

“I said, 'Oh my God, they’re like vultures!'” Peres said.

Michelle Almeno, a Gloucester resident of about two years, attended Mayor Carolyn Kirk’s news conference in City Hall on Monday.

“People are very upset in Gloucester that so much attention is being given to this; it’s negative attention,” she said. “This is a nice community.”

Reporters and camera crews waited outside the mayor’s office while she met with city officials. Gloucester residents who came to City Hall to purchase beach stickers, pay parking tickets and conduct other business mumbled about how they chose the wrong day as they weaved through the crowd.

Leslie Bell, who attended the news conference, said, “It’s been a bad rap for the city. It makes Gloucester look like scum."

News crews have been filing reports from in front of Gloucester High School all week.

Joan Dallin, secretary to Gloucester High School Principal Joseph Sullivan, said she has been fielding phone calls from every talk show, radio station, and TV station from here to the West coast, and has also been taking calls from international media such as the BBC and TV stations in Japan and Russia.

Dallin said the phone rang constantly for days after the Time magazine article was published.

“There was no time to do anything but answer the phones,” she said. “It was just a constant barrage of phone calls.”

Superintendent Christopher Farmer had no comment on how the media attention might have an affect on the school system.